ManageWP enters the WordPress news space

After months of mystery, the guys at ManageWP have offered a sneak peak at their entry into the WordPress news space.

ManageWP.org is a WordPress news aggregator, kind of like Digg, where users can submit articles and start discussions.

Members of the site can vote for their favourite stories and the most popular items are featured on the front page.

I received an email invite to check out the site. It’s easy enough to login using your Twitter account and navigate the site. Submitting articles is as simple as copying and pasting a link and adding a short description.

There is also a members section where users are ranked based on the number of articles/discussions they have submitted and the votes and comments on their stories. The rankings add a competitive edge to the site, encouraging users to get involved in order to improve their reputation.

ManageWP founder Vladimir Prelovac.

ManageWP.org was originally planned for launch on August 2, but that date came and went.

ManageWP founder Vladimir Prelovac simply put the delay down to “developers :)” and said he expected the site to launch “within a few weeks”.

“Everything is ready as you could see, we are doing some last minute polishing,” Prelovac said.

Once launched, he hopes the site will “contribute a lot” to the WordPress community.

“It was made with one thing in mind – to condense the community knowledge into one accessible location,” he said.

“Always on the hunt for quality WordPress content, it became increasingly difficult for me to find it scattered all over the web and I hope the site will solve that problem.”

ManageWP continues to tease with a static image of its news site.

Last month, Prelovac told WPMU.org the company’s news offering “is imagined as WordPress news on the go with a concept similar to popular news apps like Flipboard or ZIte with community features similar to inbound.org.”

“There are so many fantastic sources and it has been very difficult to track them all,” he said.

“We want to build a place for the community to thrive and discover cool articles similar to reddit or former Digg.”

For now while the site is still being tweaked and populated, adding images to articles is a bit clumsy and it’s hard to control how the feature images look on the front page. Hopefully these kinds of bugs will be ironed out before the site is launched to the public.

Digg has faced problems with users abusing its voting system in the past.

The big question is whether the site will be able to build and maintain a strong and engaged community of people large enough to ensure the news content is kept fresh and up-to-date – and to avoid the problems Digg has faced in the past.

Back in 2010, so-called “power users” at Digg began supporting only one another’s posts, flooding the site with articles by a select few and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users on the front page.

The ManageWP team have put a hell of a lot of work into their news offering but ultimately the WordPress community will decide its success.

Does the WordPress community need a news aggregator? Tell us what you think in the comments below.